I changed hosting providers recently and therefore had to migrate all of my demo and production WordPress sites to a completely new server with a different management interface. This is daunting enough on it’s own when you have the possibility of losing your precious work,and having to redo it all again.
The traditional way of migrated a WordPress based site is to log in and copy all of the files over, this also includes moving the database and changing the wp-config.php, which can be very scary for some users.
I had a plugin recommended to me by a fellow developer called All In One WP Migration, at first i thought it would be like every other plugin – kind of works and I end up deleting it all and going back to traditional methods. However using this plugin a simple file is downloaded and you simply install the plugin on the new site and upload the wpress file to your new site. This copies everything from media to database to users all in one simple step.
I even got the chance to test their support, my upload was hanging at 35.41% – odd number I know. I emailed them and half an hour later got a reply detailing how to manually upload the file. As they did not know how experienced I am they even provided simple instructions with a video which for a new user is very informative so ++ to them on that front.
So what am I trying to say – this is not a paid advertisement by any stretch however I love this plugin and it has saved me countless hours to move sites and also effort. Sometimes the old methods just work very reliably however for the new user these can be daunting and time consuming for the more experienced ones. That’s not to say that there are not any draw backs. There are a couple – bolt on’s to the plugin are very expensive such as to store backups – yes it also does backups for you, on Google Drive, dropbox etc, however most people don’t need to move directly to those services it can be done by simply downloading and re-uploading again. The biggest drawback for some users is the limit of a 512MB file limit that it has when you import your site, however most sites do not exceed this and if you have created an optimized site it is expected your site will fall within those limits.
